WebsitePolicies Review: Generate Legal Agreements for Your Blog

Any website you visit today or Mobile app you use will most likely have a couple legal pages on them, such as the Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, Refund Policy etc. How do you create them is what this WebsitePolicies review will help you out with.

Do the pages include everything a page like them should
include? Can you make these pages yourselves without using third-party help?
These are just some of the questions we aim to answer throughout this piece.

WebsitePolicies Review: What is WebsitePolicies.com?

Obviously WebsitePolicies.com isn’t the kind of site you see
everyday, hence the first question that pops up is what exactly is WebsitePolicies?

In my personal opinion and words, it’s an A.I Internet
Lawyer, an expert one at that. It lets users create legal documents for their
Websites, Mobile apps and other similar platforms.

For the users, it’s simply a form-filling process. It reduces
the cost to a fraction of what it would be if done by offline lawyers.

Even though it’s completely automated, and delivers the
policies/ banners instantly, the
core-policies were actually drafted by actual lawyers. These policies are then
customized according to user needs, brand, region and other such requirements.

WebsitePolicies Overview

Here’s a brief glimpse of the company
before diving deeper into this WebsitePolicies review:

Why do you Need Website Policies?

The next logical question is, do you really need those
documents? And if so, do you really need WebsitePolicies (or other similar
tools) to create them and not do them yourselves?

The answer to the question is three-fold which encompasses
the Legal-factor, the “Accuracy factor” and the Trust- factor.

The Legal factor is the first and most important reason why
you’d need those pages on your website.

It’s required by various laws across the globe, such as the
GDPR which was enforced on 25th May, 2018 to ensure you have a
Cookie Policy page/banner on your site if you collect personal information from
your audience.

Failing to do so has serious consequences.

In Canada it’s the PIPED (Personal Information Protection
and Electronic Documents) Act you have to adhere to if you own a Website or
App.

Australia has the Privacy Act of 1988, while UK has the DPA (Data
Protection Act). Similarly most other nations have other such Acts which
require you by law to have those pages on your website.

As for the USA, there are various laws which need to be
bundled together and taken into account while getting the legal pages done.
Some of which are the COPPA, the CalOPPA, CSA (Computer Security Act)
1997 and many others.

And it’s not just “Countries”, quite a few third-party
apps/websites too require you to have those legal pages ready before you can
use these third-party products on your website/app.

The most common third-party resource attached to Websites are Google Adsense and Google Analytics, aren’t they?

Well both of those require you to have a specific set of
clauses on your site to inform users of the required information.

Bottomline, if you do not have the required legal pages,
users can file serious legal charges against you on Privacy violation, Fraud,
misinformation and many other grounds.

Also, the third-party apps may deny payment, or even file a
case in some cases if you haven’t complied to their requirement of the legal
pages, or specific clauses.

So they’re legally very important, that’s established.

The final reason why you need external help from companies
like WebsitePolicies is- Accuracy.

For starters, I doubt any of us (me included) are
well-versed in the legal requirements of such pages. We wouldn’t know what
information to ask for, declare, or what clauses to include.

Missing any one of these has the same consequences as missing
the entire page altogether.

If you write these pages yourselves, there’s every chance
that some of those will be missed and that’s why such third-party educated-help
may come in handy.

Secondly, knowing “English” and knowing the “legal” language
are two very different things. For e.g.
in common, everyday language a word means many different things but in the
court of law it’s interpreted differently.

Hence, these legal pages have to be accurate, use the legally
correct, most descriptive and non-vague words which we may not be aware of.

This again is where expert help such as WebsitePolicies.com
may be employed to avoid the least chances of the wrong information being
conveyed, clauses being missed and so on.

What can WebsitePolicies.com Generate?

There isn’t just one type of legal page
your website/app needs, rather many. How many, or which of these can WebsitePolicies.com
generate is what we’ll address in this section of this WebsitePolicies review.

So the platform can generate:

Privacy Policies

Terms and Conditions

Disclaimer

Refund Policy

Cookie Policy

& Cookie Consent Banner.

Privacy Policies

The Privacy Policy is what most govts. pay
most attention to and have direct laws governing the same.

These are the pages which disclose your
nature of collecting, using, storing as well as safe-keeping the personal
information of users.

The govt. regulations differ for each
country and region, so what information can or can’t be collected too differ
for each country.

Some countries make it mandatory for you
to have an “opt out” button, with some
others it may be optional.

Just like it’s not mandatory under CalOPPA
to respond to a “Do not track” request, however if your company/site/app does
or doesn’t respond to those requests has to be mentioned in the Privacy Policy.

The Australian Privacy Act of 1988 has 13
core Principals governing its Privacy policies, while the UK DPA has 8.

Some laws even dictate the placement,
visibility and other such factors regarding the Privacy Policies.

What I’m trying to establish here is, these
policies aren’t just articles that you can churn up yourself and put up for
display, they do have to be done the right way.

Terms and Conditions

These are less govt-controlled and more
like an agreement of terms before a user can use your website/app.

It may consist of anything you want your
visitor to know about the nature of your products, delivery, quality or anything else.

It also consists of what you expect from
the visitor/user/customer in certain scenarios.

Having a T&C primarily helps you avoid
unwanted pleasantries and keep things transparent between you and the visitor.

Disclaimer

There’s a ton of information and/or
products on any given website. The Disclaimer helps you limit your legal
liability in case something goes wrong or is misinterpreted.

It’s also a legal requirement to be used
when selling most third-party products to customers, announcing your gains if
the sale happens.

Refund Policy

Ah, you already know what this is even if
you don’t own a website or product, don’t you?

It states the circumstances under which a
company will refund a purchase. The amount of refund, time required for the
refund and everything else is included in the Refund policy.

Cookie Policy and Consent Banner

After the GDPR being passed in May last
year, this is something that requires serious attention from Website and App
owners on the internet.

Cookie Policy is what outlines your nature
of storing, using, and sharing user cookies. The way the cookies are stored and
everything else related to the Cookies.

The consent banner is the newest addition.
It’s a banner displayed on sites which has to outline your cookie policy
actively without needing users to manually find or stumble upon it.

Here’s an example from WebsitePolicies of
what a Cookie Consent Banner is. This too can be created in seconds using
WebsitePolicies.

Cookie Consent Banner

In a nutshell, any legally binding
page/document that you as a website owner should have, can be created using
WebsitePolicies.

How to Use WebsitePolicies?

Finally down to the most important section
of this WebsitePolicies review. How can you create those pages for your
website?

As mentioned in the earlier sections of
this WebsitePolicies review, the process involves just filling couple forms
out.

For starters, simply go to the homepage and
click on “Getting Started”. After which, you’ll be asked to choose the exact
document you need drafted.

For this example, I’m going with “Privacy
Policies”. This is the kind of form that’s displayed:

Note that there’s a slider on top which
displays your progress, hence the User-interface wins 5-stars from me.

The form by itself is extremely easy to be
understood and filled. Simply enter your location, company/website name and
other details.

The form as is evident can be customized
entirely to match your “brand” and the policy won’t be a generic one.

On the next page, specify if there’s a
registered company for the website/app or it’s run by an individual.

Then, choose if your website/app has a
signup option for users.

Simply keep clicking the right buttons and
proceeding to the next pages (no use going through all the questions here,
is it?).

Finally when you reach 100% completion, this is what you should see:

Simply enter your E-mail address. You’ll be
asked to go to your E-mail and click on a verification link.

Clicking on the link automatically takes
users back to WebsitePolicies and you can click on your Policy name to view it
right away.

Automatic Embedding and Display

This is a factor that impressed me with the
company and hence is being mentioned in this WebsitePolicies review.

Once a Policy is done, you don’t have to
“get creative” trying to embed or display it on your site.

Rather, the company offers a number of
options:

Free hosting on WebsitePolicies:
Meaning, simply use the provided link and the policy will forever be hosted on
WebsitePolicies, as well as be updated automatically with recent regulations.
This helps save not just time, but also server resources on your website.

HTML Code: Embed it on your
site to display the policy.

Plain text.

Customization Abilities and Consent Banner

Most other forms can be created in the same
way as the Privacy Policy, simply click on choices and you’re done.

However the consent banner is different, it
offers more designing abilities, colour choices, layouts and other choices.
Hence this separate section so we could do justice to the service being
provided.

Here’s what the configuration wizard looks
like:

As is evident, users get to choose:

Position

Layout

Colours (tons of predesigned
combinations).

Custom text etc.

You can even preview it in real-time and
make changes. It takes seconds, or minutes at best, offers a lot of
customization abilities and is free.

Pricing Plans: Largely free, Optional Premium Package.

One of the final sections to this WebsitePolicies
review is its pricing plan. Is it free? Well it largely is.

What I mean is, you can create almost all
the pages and documents without having to pay a penny.

They also can be used both for Commercial,
as well as Personal uses without restrictions.

However they do have optional paid plans
which cost USD $14.95 one-time.

Free plans have some restrictions, for
starters you can’t include some specific commercial clauses during policy
creation, primarily the ones related with “payments”.

The “info” icon shows up on clauses which
can’t be included in the free plan.

Then, these free policies also must have a
link with credits to WebsitePolicies.com. And finally, the paid policies have
more clauses and statements than free ones.

Support

I didn’t expect for a legal company as such
to actually provide live-support, which it did!

They obviously have E-mail and contact us
pages, but for some hours throughout the day (not 24X7) they also have a
live-chat available. The representative I talked to (Steven) was not
only informative but also “fast” (which is a rarity).

Final Word on WebsitePolicies Review

So that’s a wrap as far as this WebsitePolicies.com review goes. If you ask for my verdict, I’d say it’s straight-forward, fast and easy to understand.

Checks all the right boxes, offers various
documents to be created, has all the clauses which should be there in one such
policy and also allows for custom clauses.

Bottomline, I’m pretty impressed. Although
do drop your two cents in the comments both about this WebsitePolicies review
as well as the platform in general.